As DogCatcher in a good neighborhood, I don’t always have a lot of critters to be chasing down.
Now if I were in your neighborhood I would be concerned.
That’s the way politics works. My stuff is OK but you have problems.
Since dogs aren’t good at observing boundaries it often seems that your problems become mine, and mine yours.
Have tried TEA. Have tried coffee. Have met a lot of good people. Haven’t met a lot of other dog catchers.
So I was thinking: what if there was a group for fiscally conservative, socially liberal and pragmatic people. Centrists. Whether they lean right or lean left matters less than they all believe that we are one people of different hues all in this together. What if?
We could be a party. We could be an advocacy group called a party. We could be a philosophical grouping of people that became a party. We could just have a party and draw straws as to who does what next.
My line of thought is to form something called a party and to work out the details when we have a second member. We would endorse candidates in 2012 and look to run candidates and/or endorse candidates in 2014.
We do not even have to be an exclusive party. Whether now or in the future, if a Democrat or a Republican or an Independent fits the bill then we could endorse them and they can remain whatever they are, or want to be. Let’s not reinvent the wheel. Let’s get people of 80% likemindedness together where they have a political home without having to lean left or right.
(And it is amazing how some have managed to avoid tipping over the edges of known reality.)
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The BIG Question
I posed the question on Facebook: Who is for starting the LDP – Libertarian Democratic Party?
Don’t worry about the name too much. We can fix that. Suggestions welcome.
All the good names are taken: Beer Party, Coffee Party, Tea Party, Fizzy Cola Party.
My thoughts about the LDP – Libertarian Democratic Party.
Libertarian – there needs to be a solid focus on both freedom of the individual and on personal responsibility. I do believe in minimal government, but that requires that people and institutions be responsible for their actions. With freedom comes responsibility. Let’s talk and focus on that. Let’s also recognize that Americans come in different colors and often prefer to hold hands with different people than you or I might choose. Let’s balance budgets, build roads, foster great schools and not focus on excluding people because of their preference for strawberry ice cream with lime over just vanilla or chocolate.
Democratic – this word makes some people crazy. My thoughts here are that it needs to be understood that we are open and working for all Americans. You could be conservative. You could be liberal. You could be permanently undecided. You could be so independent that your vote changes 4 times between your car and the voting booth. The question though is whether you are willing to work for the greater good of all Americans.
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George asks …
Over the last year or so while exploring I met George. George is one tough guy.
You know the two cranky guys up in the balcony in the Muppets? George can out-critique the both of them.
Just as Pinocchio had Jiminy Cricket to keep him on the straight and narrow, I have George.
Not that I am Pinocchio but hopefully you get the drift of where I am going with this … George keeps me honest in a grumpy 24/7 reviewer-in-the-balcony kind of way. He never seems to run out of tomatoes and slightly aged eggs.
So George read my Facebook entry and asked:
I suppose if you are serious about running for office, you must first decide at what level. If it is to be at the federal level, how do you plan to:
A. Solve the debt problem?
B. Create jobs?
C. End the wars?
D. Fix Social Security and Medicare?
Next question–if you do run for office at any level–what are you going to do on the second day you are in office?
A. Start working on getting reelected?
B. Start working on the problems as you perceive them?
C. Go on some lobbyist sponsored trip/cruise/flight to see ???
If you don’t have answers to these questions–why bother?
George is dependable like that. He has questions and he already doesn’t like the answers … even before he gets them.
I like George … we all need Georges in our lives.
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Dear George and Bill4DogCatcher.com Readers:
Assuming that people elect you to fulfill some level of promises made during the campaign I would start to work on those promises.
As for the four issues that were raised by George:
Federal Debt and Deficits
How to solve the debt problem — the shortterm fix is to slow or halt the growth of the debt. The U.S. paid out approximately $436 billion just in interest payments during 2010. Should our credit rating be downgraded to AA then the interest rate on our borrowing would probably rise to 3-4% and the interest paid out could almost double … we are only paying 1-2% now with our AAA rating.
>> How to slow: require that all expenditures have a funding source.
There are two major challenges here: war expenses and entitlements. It would probably be fruitless to insist that the black hole known as national defense actually be paid for but it we should try. Almost half of 2010′s deficit spending — $840 billion — went just to discretionary spending for defense and security. Add the regular defense budget to that and about 1/10th of American GDP went just to funding war in 2010.
The second major challenge is entitlement spending. Medicare is beyond broke on the financial side of the house, with an estimated $38 trillion never collected for the trust fund but which will be needed over the next 20 years. Put another way, to rescue medicare as we know it will require about 1/7th of annual U.S. GDP for 20 years. Medicare needs triage: it needs to become means tested, higher copays, and the basic medicare tax needs to be raised.
>> Whatever we can do make it more efficient just goes without saying as medicare is not a program full of pork.
On the debt in the longer term, we need to raise taxes by 5-7% and rescind the Bush tax cuts. The 5-7% tax increase should be sunset provisioned so that the tax goes away automatically once the debt can be serviced via other measures such a increased revenues or when it falls below a certain level.
Jobs Creation
How to create jobs — this is a tricky question for me. I believe that we are undergoing a permanent realignment of how people work and that the very definition of ‘work’ and ‘career’ is changing. The skills are changing too.
>> I firmly believe that we are in a period where new jobs in raw numbers will be almost non-existent between now and 2024. Jobs for junior professionals will begin to open up in 2016-2017. Maybe. Our market will not reach equilibrium until we begin to reach the end of the Boomer generation leaving the work force.
Creating jobs — my immediate focus would be on getting credit markets to provide low cost loans to small businesses. Small business finds credit hard to come by, yet small business has created 2 out of 3 jobs since 2007.
I would also focus on infrastructure and education as a way to create jobs.
Infrastructure — very high speed internet needs to be everywhere. It must be so common that no one evens thinks about having access to it. The Internet is a huge enabler and cost reducer for business.
Physical infrastructure also needs attention. I believe that states, counties and cities should take the lead in this. Rather than block grants I believe that very low cost loans need to be made to these more local governments to fund specific projects.
Education — There is no good reason that a college degree should be so expensive. We can not dictate to schools what they should charge for a quality education, but we should encourage certain behavior via funding low cost education loans for students that attend schools with high graduation rates for those skills that are in demand within communities.
Ending the Wars & War in General
The wars — Thomas Jefferson said that the best way to prevent most wars from happening is to ask people to pay for them as they occur.
>> Jefferson “It is incumbent on every generation to pay its own debts as it goes. A principle which if acted on would save one-half the wars of the world.”
Short of a declared war, and short of our ability to pay for it, we should pay for defense in full, just like all other parts of the federal budget should be paid for via balanced budgets.
We do not need credit card wars except with threat is imminent and we have not had time to prepare.
I would also encourage the greater use of special forces, remote and standoff attack capabilities such as drone warfare and drone overwatch, and I would grow the capabilities of our human intelligence elements on the ground.
I am not an isolationist. We should be very proactive in the world and I would like to see our forces prepositioned and stationed around the world as much as possible. This is good not only for having a highly experience force but also for developing an understanding of the world.
We need to stop reacting. We need greater cultural awareness and relationships with other countries. The world needs to know that we are not going to become isolationists due to our overreach in both Iraq and in Afghanistan.
Social Security and Medicare
>> Medicare I’ve addressed as part of national debt.
>> Social Security — there are issues but they are not insurmountable. Social Security is now an American institution and absolutely essential to the prosperity of the country as a whole — we cannot return to the days when retirement often meant a lowered quality of life for many Americans, perhaps 1 in 3.
To stabilize Social Security, I would support:
– raising the retirement age to 69, or unchanged for those that are disabled and prevented from working before age 69.
– means testing for two levels of benefits. Social Security survived its 1937 Supreme Court challenge because the Roosevelt Administration argued that it was not an insurance program. It was to be a tax that provided assistance to those that needed it — that was the argument.
We can probably make sure that those need it actually get it by means testing.
I would also consider capping the annual payout so that it matched available trust funds. For example, if someone were scheduled to receive $1750 per month and the trust funds fully supported that with no red ink projected then $1750 would be the check received.
However, if trust fund were low and the trust only supported $1600 then the payment would be lowered to $1600.
This would be adjusted monthly.
This approach could be seen as ‘not keeping the promise’. Payout according to funds availability is much better than the program collapsing due to lack of funding.
People need to feel the effect of their economic decisions. If the trust fund is running low and Americans support higher taxes or alternative funding methods then good, else the budget must be balanced.
… as for what I am really going to do on my second day in office, the questions that George gave me were:
A. Start working on getting reelected?
B. Start working on the problems as you perceive them?
C. Go on some lobbyist sponsored trip/cruise/flight to see ???
My answers, having been a DogCatcher for awhile:
A — Day 2 is always the first day of your next campaign.
B — Yes, start working on problem solving … and learning the ropes of how things work once the door is closed. As someone that is independent minded it will take a while to gain the trust and the shared insight of those that are reelected incumbents and that control the real processes at work.
C — =^) … with my luck and junior status a junket for me would probably be to watch potatoes grow in Idaho as I move up the agricultural committee foodchain.
